Outspoken magicians Penn and Teller have long fought with academics, religious
zealots, and Donald Trump. For their next trick, they’d like to make drug
laws disappear

What kind of trickery is this? First of all, Teller struggles to unscrew the cap on the bottle of fizzy water plonked on the hotel boardroom table. Having a couple of decades on the diminutive 66-year-old magician, I give it a go. Failing miserably, I hand it to his hulking partner, Penn Jillette, 59, who is twice the man of each of us. Or, he’s the two of us combined. He can’t open it either.

Penn and Teller quietly harrumph. The temperature in the over-air-conditioned conference space drops another notch.

The magicians have travelled from Las Vegas to a hotel in central London. Also on their schedule: a trip to the BBC’s Manchester studios to visit Blue Peter. They’ve been trying to think of a kiddie-friendly trick. They think “maybe the muffin trick. But adults are very good at underestimating children’s ability to make choices,” says Teller with a hint of reproach, “so they often try to make us do things that seem absolutely innocuous.”

Meanwhile, on the horizon is another auspicious event: the 40th anniversary of the pair’s partnership. Penn and Teller are Las Vegas stalwarts, packing ’em in at The Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, and the most famous magicians in the world have previously said retirement isn’t in their vocabulary. But as they stare down the barrel of their fifth decade together, is that still the case? “Not today,” states Penn flatly. “Today retirement seems pretty good.”

Penn and Teller are the magicians for people who don’t like magicians. Not so much for their tricks, staggering and inventive though they are. (In one famous illusion, a red ball becomes Teller’s faithful companion, even jumping through hoops at his command; in another, the magician emerges unscathed after being “run over” by a 16-tonne tractor-trailer.) These conjurers toy brilliantly with the tropes of magic – the bullets caught in mouths, the not-so-humble pack of cards – and use them to debunk mysteries, lampoon ho-hum sleights of hand and make whip-smart intellectual, political and philosophical points.

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The single-monikered Teller is the sleeping partner of the pair, insofar as he never speaks onstage. And insofar as he maintains that mostly expressionless demeanour even in conversation. But the man is no dummy. He’s a one-time classics scholar (Latin and Greek) who has been working on a new adaptation of The Tempest. After this visit he’s taking Shakespeare’s magician’s tale to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a production he’s directing for the American Repertory Theatre.

Two years ago Teller took on the academics at The Smithsonian, writing an article for the institution’s magazine that was “a mockery of some scientists who have come to magicians in search of scientific experiments,” he says with quiet intensity and focus. “They’ve taken magic principles as something that can be easily and simply tested in a lab with eye-tracking.

But such is Teller’s passion for his craft that he wasn’t about to let a few scientists, well, take away the magic. Viewing his field as something to study “is foolhardy. Magic is a pretty complex mass of elements that all work at the same time to create a certain kind of experience. And they think it can be simplified to something as straightforward as eye-tracking. So I mock that.”

Penn, the ponytailed six-foot-sixer, is more provocative still. He’s an atheist – so is Teller, but less loudly so – who has written books titled God, No! and Every Day is an Atheist Holiday! (exclamation marks, author’s own).

“I think that 9/11 made a lot of atheists more vocal,” Penn begins, hands clasped, businesslike, in front of him. “A lot of us – [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins and Ricky Gervais – just took that as a sign of how dangerous it was to be quiet at all.

“I don’t think anybody became atheist because of that event,” he adds. “But a lot of people who were atheist decided to shut up less about it. But I’ve been an outspoken atheist for 40 years. I’ve never held back.”

Death threats? “Sure. There’s a macho thing that I used to do with Richard Dawkins and [South Park/The Book of Mormon co-creator] Trey Parker – we’d pull out our death threats and compare them. 'Look at these people that want to kill me!’

“And all of a sudden it came to me that we weren’t really talking about religion at all. We were talking about mentally ill people we happen to label in a certain way. And the numbers are so , so, so small… yeah, once in a while the police are called on someone who’s written something that crosses a line, and that’s sad – and that person could just as easily be an atheist, or anything. You can talk all you want about the violent imagery of religion – but it’s not the violent imagery of religion that’s making people send out death threats. It’s a mental illness.”

But of late he’s tempered that response. You might say it was due to late-in-life fatherhood calming his edge – or you would until you heard his children’s names: daughter Moxie CrimeFighter is nine, and son Zolten is eight.

Penn is also a libertarian who believes in rolling back the frontiers of the state – pretty much all the way, it seems. Where does he stand on the legalising of all drugs?

“Well, it’s safer for children to have them legal, in a way. When you have drugs illegal you give people that live outside the law a great deal of power. McDonald’s and Burger King don’t have gang wars.”

Penn insists that he doesn’t have “a rosy view: if you make it legal there will be a lot of downsides. But maybe those downsides will be less against innocent people.” He cites the “experiments” in legalising marijuana in certain states. “It’s very hard to explain that to someone outside the country ’cause no one in the country understands it,” he says pointedly. “But we’ll see how that goes. There’s certainly brain damage that comes from using marijuana in one’s youth. There’s no doubt about that.”

How would he react if his children were to try drugs? “I guess we’ll find out,” he shrugs. “They almost certainly will. I’ve never done drugs. But I’m aware everybody else does, and everybody else does a fine job with it. So I can’t imagine my children will be any different.”

Such is Penn and Teller’s fame in the US that Penn was invited to take part in its version of Celebrity Apprentice. Donald Trump had the Sir Alan Sugar role of genius entrepreneur. But Penn was less than impressed with Trump, finding his thinking as insubstantial as his hair. “Donald’s one of those people that as long as he’s in the press, that’s good. And probably from his point of view, that’s true.”

Warming to his theme (Donald seems to really get his goat), Penn expands, talking about “a group of people where there’s somebody really interesting like Neil Young, or somebody really damaged like Gary Busey, or someone cynical and empty like Donald Trump… There’s something fascinating about people who speak without a filter.”

There is, he concludes, something “interesting in the ranting. 'So this is what happens when someone who should have been told to shut up two hours ago, wasn’t.’”

Finally Teller awakens from his repose and pops back into the conversation, deadpan, dry and wry.

“It’s the verbal equivalent of Siegfried and Roy’s style.”

Ah, yes, Las Vegas’s other kingly magicians. It seems Penn and Teller don’t care so much for the flamboyantly theatrical – and more traditionally “Las Vegas” – bent of their Sin City rivals. But what of Britain’s magicians – who do they rate? They profess half-hearted enthusiasm for the close-quarter magic of Dynamo. Teller says that while they admire his skills, “we know people like Johnny Thompson who’s 78 – and by comparison with whom [Dynamo’s] skills are somewhat… minimal. Compared with some of the old masters of this stuff.”

He’s less lofty when it comes to Derren Brown. “He’s one of the best live performers I’ve ever seen. He really puts a lot of intelligence and thought into it. He’s an artist.”

Back to Vegas, they offer respect to David Copperfield. His work ethic seems to be key to their enthusiasm.

“He does really good tricks, and he’s always doing new ones. But there aren’t many [magicians], you know?” Penn says heavily. Yes, there’s Siegfried and Roy, “but since Roy got his head bit off by a tiger, that slows him down somewhat. David Blaine doesn’t really do anything now. Why not? I don’t know. I don’t think he made that much money… In music you can really name what 100 people are doing. But in magic there just aren’t that many.”

And in Las Vegas it seems that that development is actually the fault of music. The city has become the centre of the American love affair with club culture, or EDM (Electronic Dance Music) in their parlance. Travel in from McCarran International Airport these days and all you see are towering billboards advertising resort residencies by this or that, mostly European, DJ.

“It’s a big change,” acknowledges Penn. “In the Sixties Vegas was the happening place – you had the Rat Pack – and it was socially very relevant. Then by the Eighties people went there ironically. No one ever went to see a real show in the Eighties. You had George Burns impressionists, and just terrible acts.”

Entertaining the audience on Saturday Night Live in 1986 (Al Levine/NCBU Photo Bank)

The Nineties brought the introduction of “some real acts, us and Blue Man Group and so on, and they did better. But now in the 21st century Vegas becomes the EDM capital and the DJs run everything. The shows are secondary to the nightclubs, and the finances of Vegas centre around EDM.”

In this new Vegas, Penn and Teller are an act apart. These old-school entertainers’ audiences aren’t club-hoppers, “and anybody younger that might come to our show is going to EDM when they come here, so we get marginalised that way. And that’s fine. That’s fine,” he repeats. Although judging by his next comments, I suspect Penn might protest too much.

“The EDM people are getting a quarter of a million [dollars] a night, and you have bottle [drinks] service that goes from a hundred to a grand. And it’s a whole scene that I don’t understand. I feel a bit like when Lenny Bruce went to see Frank Zappa and said: 'I don’t understand this.’”

“But we’re doing fabulously,” he says with a defiant flourish. “Anybody over 30 does not care at all about EDM. And that market’s wide open.”

So this ever-inventive pair are upping their game. They live a mile from a each other in appropriately architecturally daring houses: Penn’s pink-hued desert mansion is called The Slammer; Teller lives in a camouflaged hillside bunker with Escher-like lines and a talking bronze bear in the courtyard (“it tells you what card you’re thinking of”). They meet every Tuesday to brainstorm new ideas. And there is, they reveal, a grand illusion to come.

“We have one that’s waiting in the wings,” says Teller, positively twinkling. “We’re going to make an elephant vanish – only the elephant is really a cow dressed as an elephant. A live cow.”